5 Ways to Maximize Your Email Deliverability
Jack Hodges
May 04, 2018
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11 min read
Email-Marketing
In this article, you'll discover essential tips to maximize your email deliverability, ensuring your marketing campaigns reach their intended audience and drive engagement. You'll learn about email reputation, common reasons for low email deliverability, and the importance of authentication, as well as practical steps to improve deliverability and create emails that people love.
Key Takeaways:
- Email reputation is crucial for deliverability, and the sender score is determined by factors like reach, engagement, and permission.
- Common reasons for low email deliverability include unsubscribe rate, hard bounces, spam complaints, bounce rate, and open rate.
- Authentication methods like DKIM, SPF, and TLS are critical for email deliverability.
- Strategies to improve email deliverability include using double opt-in confirmation, making it easy to opt-out, being consistent with your email sender name, segmenting your email list, cleaning your email list, authenticating your email domain, avoiding spammy subject lines, and sending valuable content that people want to read.
- FiveCRM helps with email deliverability by streamlining lead management and offering a robust email marketing and telemarketing platform.
Are your email open rates not meeting expectations? According to Forbes, email marketing is the most powerful tool in your company’s toolbox. Keeping your email deliverability high is essential to driving engagement and increasing your email marketing campaign's click-through rate. If your emails don’t make it to your subscribers’ inboxes, your efforts are futile. To ensure your emails aren’t getting blocked by email filters, here are some of the top things you can do to minimize email deliverability issues and maximize your email deliverability rate for higher open rates.
Table of Contents
How Email Reputation Impacts Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is a valuable metric for a marketing campaign. It represents the percentage of emails that end up in the recipient’s inbox versus those that do not. Email service providers (ESPs) are becoming increasingly vigilant about blocking emails that might be considered spam. When it comes to email deliverability, sender reputation is everything. Email reputation is the overall trustworthiness of your email campaign. ESPs determine your email and domain reputation by factors like low engagement, opt-in rate, and delivery rate for the number of emails you send. Poor email reputation negatively impacts deliverability. Email service providers offer different ways to track and monitor your email reputation, but the main factors in determining sender score fall under the categories of reach, engagement, and permission.
5 Common Reasons for Low Email Deliverability
To find your email delivery rate, take a look at your email campaign statistics. For example, if 100 people received your email and 80 opened it, then your delivery rate is 80%. If only 50 people received your email and 25 opened it, then your delivery rate would be 50%. The deliverability rate varies by industry. According to Statista, most industries average an 80% deliverability rate. Thus, anything below 80% is considered low. The most common reasons for low email deliverability are:
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Unsubscribe Rate: This is the percentage of people who have clicked the “unsubscribe” link on your email.
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Hard Bounces: A hard bounce is when an email address has been blacklisted and is no longer valid. Keeping your database up to date and removing incorrect addresses is one way to improve your deliverability.
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Spam Complaints: The complaint rate goes up when someone feels that your email is inappropriate, illegal, or offensive, and they can report it as spam.
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Bounce Rate: The percentage of emails that were delivered but did not receive any clicks.
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Open Rate: This metric represents the percentage of people who have opened your email.
Why Authentication (DKIM, SPF, TLS) Is Critical To Email Deliverability
Email authentication is the process of proving that a message was sent from a legitimate source. Authenticating email reduces the likelihood of the email ending up in the spam folder. Email authentication comes in the form of Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
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TLS: Transport Layer Security is an encryption protocol that provides secure communication over the Internet. TLS is often used to secure web-based email and other online communications, such as instant messaging, chat rooms, and online banking.
Improve Email Deliverability
Email deliverability is critical to a successful email marketing campaign. If your messages aren’t getting through, all is not lost. Check out these tips to get things back on track.
Double Opt-In Confirmation
Double opt-in is an email marketing best practice that helps avoid unwanted emails. The process requires subscribers to click on a button to confirm their interest in receiving communication from the company. It’s especially important to use double opt-in for email blasts that include content marketing, transactional product or service offers, or surveys. Once you receive the confirmation, the person is added to your email list. Then, you can use an email marketing tool to email your subscribers with a high deliverability rate.
Make it Easy for Them to Opt-Out
Give your subscribers an easy way out. This will prevent your emails from going to people who don’t want them and will also keep your email provider from flagging your account as spam. There are a few different ways that you can make the opt-out process easier. The simplest way is to place an “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of every email. If you’re sending emails to people who signed up through a form on your website, provide a link that takes them back to that form so they can unsubscribe.
Be Consistent With Your Email Sender Name
The importance of a consistent sender name cannot be stressed enough. It is important for brand recognition, email marketing compliance, and much more. When setting up your email account or choosing your sender name, make sure that it is easy for your subscribers to remember. Also, make sure it associates your brand with something that makes sense for your company. A good sender name is short, easy to read, and representative of your brand. It’s a good idea to include your company’s name or main product in the sender's name. This will make it easier for your subscribers to identify your emails and decide whether they want to open them.
Segment Your Email List
Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your subscriber list into groups based on criteria. The most common is by interests. You could also segment based on purchase history, tenure, or other data points. Once you have a segmented email list, you can then send more relevant emails to your subscribers. Targeting in this way allows you to send highly relevant content to each group. If you are sending the same content to everyone, it will be hard to get attention from the right subscribers. Collect as much information about your subscribers as possible. Using this data, create different segments based on interests, behavior, or other factors. The next step is to create content that is relevant to each segment. This will not only improve your engagement but will also make sure that your marketing emails reach their intended destination.
Clean Your Email List
Email deliverability relies on the quality of the emails in your contact list. Poor email list hygiene negatively impacts deliverability and causes your emails to either get blocked or ignored by your subscribers. Email list maintenance should be viewed as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Email list hygiene can be broken down into three main categories: opt-in confirmation, correct email addresses, and email content. Using an email marketing tool lets see your contacts in one system so you can keep up with keeping things clean.
Authenticate Your Email Domain
Authenticating your email domain is a form of email validation and is the best way to protect against email spoofing. Email spoofing is when spammers copy the look and feel of another company’s email to trick consumers into opening malicious emails. It is also known as email impersonation. Email spoofing can be dangerous, especially if malicious emails are sent with a company’s branding. In the worst-case scenario, email spoofing can cause consumers to share private information or fall victim to phishing attacks. Email spoofing is also a problem for email providers. If a large email provider receives a large amount of email traffic, it can be blacklisted or blocked by other email providers.
To authenticate your email domain, You need to add an SPF record to your domain’s hosting settings to let email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook know that you are the legitimate owner of your email domain. This will prevent hackers from sending emails from your email address.
To set up SPF, you’ll need to log into your domain hosting account and add an entry to your SPF settings in your email server. It will look something like this: v=spf1 include:_spf.
Avoid Spammy Subject Lines
Subject lines are the first thing your recipients will see when they open their inbox. Make sure these are high-quality, relevant, and non-spammy, so your subscribers don’t hit the unsubscribe link. A few ways to avoid spam filters are to make sure the subject line is not too long, does not use capital letters exclusively, and does not have unnecessary exclamation points.
Send Marketing Emails That People Love
Sending the right emails at the right time can help you increase conversions, grow your subscriber base, and drive more revenue. Nowadays, most people are bombarded with emails every day. Therefore, marketers must focus on creating emails that people want to read. The best way to do this is by creating valuable content that your subscribers can’t find anywhere else. The best way to do this is to be a problem solver. Offer advice or recommendations to solve their common pain points.
How FiveCRM Helps With Your Email Deliverability, So You Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Campaigns
As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do to boost your email deliverability rate. The best part is that these fixes are straightforward and really have an impact. As long as you follow these guidelines, you’ll see things improve. FiveCRM can help you make the most of your marketing campaigns. The robust email marketing and telemarketing platform streamlines lead management so you can focus on nurturing your contacts and growing your business.
To learn more or book a free demo, visit FiveCRM today.
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